Definitely. I learned MATLAB first and Spyder made it really easy to pick up Python. Anaconda also has pretty much every general package you need to get started. I still don't see why Jupyter notebooks (or MATLAB's live scripts) get so much love, the Spyder/MATLAB interface style seems so much more practical.
Seems like they have different purposes. Jupyter seems more adapted to share your work to others due to the interactivity and Spyder and other IDEs are more to do some heavy duty stuff.
What I like about Matlab is that you can easily generate and update figures on the go while your code is running (super useful in academia and research) by using figure and drawnow functions. Although I haven't spent too much time exploring the alternative in Python it seems more cumbersome to do the same thing. (Please someone prove me wrong on this!)
I agree to a point, but with academic projects there's typically a large amount of code that wouldn't benefit from being in a notebook environment. Also, more and more journals are shifting towards interactive figures, however, you don't need Jupyter to develop such figures.
Spyder in Anaconda is literally the only IDE that worked for me. I can't even run a script properly in VSCode and it lags on my potato of a laptop. Upgrading packages using conda is so easy too.
Neither of these come even close to usability of Matlab's IDE. Profiler, debugger, linter - it's all there. Also - very good backwards compatibility. Hey, you can use GUIDE to put together a GUI in a day!
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u/absolutelynoartist Aug 05 '19
Try Spyder via anaconda